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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On July 14 2017 08:27 Leporello wrote:
Our country is run by insecure sociopaths.
This is the best lawyer Trump could find.
This is a professional.
The fucking guy can't even structure a proper fucking sentence, in his threat-laden responses to random e-mails.
Heh, well his bankruptcy lawyers stated they only wanted to meet Trump in pairs, because then they had two people to corroborate what was said since Trump "says certain things and then has a lack of memory". So he must be a nightmare for lawyers
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Yeah, my social media is blowing up with this news of Russian spy attendance.
"Anyone would have taken that meeting."
lol
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On July 14 2017 20:43 farvacola wrote:
Yeah, my social media is blowing up with this news of Russian spy attendance.
"Anyone would have taken that meeting."
lol
Every time someone mentions "Anyone would have taken that meeting" I just refer them to the Al Gore campaign being given info on Bush and them notifying the FBI right away.
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On July 14 2017 20:51 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2017 20:43 farvacola wrote:
Yeah, my social media is blowing up with this news of Russian spy attendance.
"Anyone would have taken that meeting."
lol Every time someone mentions "Anyone would have taken that meeting" I just refer them to the Al Gore campaign being given info on Bush and them notifying the FBI right away.
Even if it was potentially just to protect themselves. What happened between then and now that there's even doubt whether there'll be repercussions for this behavior?
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On July 14 2017 21:08 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2017 20:51 Gorsameth wrote:On July 14 2017 20:43 farvacola wrote:
Yeah, my social media is blowing up with this news of Russian spy attendance.
"Anyone would have taken that meeting."
lol Every time someone mentions "Anyone would have taken that meeting" I just refer them to the Al Gore campaign being given info on Bush and them notifying the FBI right away. Even if it was potentially just to protect themselves. What happened between then and now that there's even doubt whether there'll be repercussions for this behavior?
It's not so much what happened in between, it's the fact that there's always been a double standard between republicans and democrats.
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There is now a fire surrounding the Trump campaign and Russia...anyone who excuses it as "not illegal" is saying they're okay with the campaign seeking help from a foreign adversary. And no, they wouldn't get that help for free.
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On July 14 2017 21:08 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2017 20:51 Gorsameth wrote:On July 14 2017 20:43 farvacola wrote:
Yeah, my social media is blowing up with this news of Russian spy attendance.
"Anyone would have taken that meeting."
lol Every time someone mentions "Anyone would have taken that meeting" I just refer them to the Al Gore campaign being given info on Bush and them notifying the FBI right away. Even if it was potentially just to protect themselves. What happened between then and now that there's even doubt whether there'll be repercussions for this behavior?
I think it will all come down to what the Mueller investigation decides.
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United States43362 Posts
I wonder how many other Republicans will volunteer to fall on their swords by saying they would have taken the meeting and accepted Russian government aid. I'm thinking very few. Trump's "we all would have done it, right guys?" is going to leave him isolated pretty quickly.
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the house of cards writers must be mad someone leaked their ideas for season 6
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BREAKING: Trump Jr. Attorney Confirms Sixth Person Attended Russian Lawyer Meeting
by Ken Meyer | 10:11 am, July 14th, 2017
There’s another one.
MSNBC reports that there was a sixth person who was present during Donald Trump Jr.‘s meeting last year with Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Earlier today, NBC reported that there was an unknown fifth person who attended the discussion where Trump Jr. and his father’s campaign staff would supposedly learn sensitive Russian information that could damage Hillary Clinton. This individual, later identified as Rinat Akhmetshin, was described as a former Soviet counterintelligence worker who currently acts as a Russian-American lobbyist.
On MSNBC Live, Stephanie Ruhle compounded the initial report by announcing that Trump Jr.’s attorney has confirmed the presence of a sixth person at the meeting. According to Trump Jr’s representative, the sixth person was there as an interpreter.
MSNBC via www.mediaite.com , video at link
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What is interesting about this is that we now know Trump doesn't know how much other people know. They are catering their message and admissions based on guesses and their guesses are wrong. They are failing to determine how much people know. Thay bodes very, very poorly for them because there is clearly some amount of unknown defection taking place.
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On July 14 2017 18:20 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.
If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.
I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.
Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.
No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument. Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies. Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations. I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad. Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc. Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers). So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page? I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive. There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later. Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude. When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently. Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc. Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article. My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning. My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard. I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children. In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway. EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from. EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand. Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost. But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality: www.theatlantic.comhttps://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.” It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it. Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website: https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded. Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices. Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all. It's late, so this is going to be short. I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years. As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades). The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school. Good spotting on the absolute versus relative mobility measures. We shouldn't mix in the changed economy and distorting effects of income inequality by looking at things in absolute terms instead of relative. Education gating incomes is also a good point. Ideally you sacrifice for your kids so they can achieve better educational outcomes and comfortable lifestyles. And tbh I wasn't expecting that moderate of an influence on grandparents predicting breadth of opportunity, but that's the good thing about research proving all kinds of wild or expected conclusions.
"Absolute" mobility cannot be ignored here, as it is quite connected to the overall argument. If the middle class is being compressed and the wealth gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, then moving from the "third" decile to the "seventh" decile might mean moving from poverty to slightly above a depressed median. The majority of America being poor, and having a 15% chance to move up to 50k a year, or whatever, isn't exactly the American dream.
You of all people, Danglars, who has harped repeatedly on how out of touch us elitist left-leaning TL'ers are with how hard it is for rural/conservative/fly-over whites, should recognize that.
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This is what happens when a large group of people assume that a freshly won WW2 life is exactly what everyone can expect forever. Work at a factory doing something a particularly well trained monkey could do? You get a house!
It was never realistic and now they are whiny their complete lack of ambition doesn't guarantee them a comfortable retirement.
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I think decreasing class mobility in the US is partly a side effect of other mobility issues, namely...
* Geographic mobility - with the state of the national housing, health care and health insurance markets in the last decade, it's been harder for the income strata just above "homeless" to relocate out-of-state. Obamacare helped a bit, but not enough.
* Career mobility - Occupational licensing, student debt, insistence by employers on college degrees and the nature of job hunting in the Internet age make it difficult for individuals to switch industries; doing so means a temporary income hit, which student loan payments can preclude.
* Lower marriage rate - While not directly a mobility issue, we should not underestimate the impact of marriage's economic union on multi-generational economic mobility.
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On July 14 2017 14:38 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.
If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.
I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.
Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.
No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument. Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies. Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations. I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad. Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc. Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers). So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page? I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive. There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later. Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude. When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently. Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc. Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article. My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning. My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard. I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children. In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway. EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from. EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand. Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost. But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality: www.theatlantic.comhttps://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.” It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it. Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website: https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded. Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices. Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all. It's late, so this is going to be short. I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years. As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades). The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school. Yeah I mean I guess if you think 10% changes in mobility (on top of already low measures of mobility: 0.59??) in the span of a couple decades over "giant" samples is nonsense then there isn't much to talk about. I too have a thesis: someone can reliably rise from the 99th percentile to the 10th percentile through accumulation of money. It's just common sense.
I don't think you fully understand what rank-rank correlation is. Here's a simulated sample of 1000 people with rank-rank correlation ~0.6.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZORiJ9l.jpg)
Now how predictive would you say that beginningRank is of endRank? Sure, it makes a difference, but most of the variance is clearly explained by other factors. This isn't "low mobility" at all. (I've included my R code at the bottom of this post so it can be independently verified that I'm not just making up numbers.)
And keep in mind that the plot above shows mobility within a generation, which has a presumably has a huge downward bias as a proxy for intergenerational mobility (which is mostly what we've been discussing). They're only looking at people who had a job at the beginning of the sample. Most people in the sample are, therefore, probably finished with school. School is presumably the greatest means to social mobility, so intergenerational mobility is almost certainly far better than the plot above (which I'd say is already pretty good).
Being born into a higher socioeconomic class is a definite advantage, but socioeconomic mobility overall is still alive and well. The fact that's it's declining measurably in no way indicates that it's dead. People are moving up and down the ladder. Of course, lots of people won't and it's a human tendency for people to blame the system for their situation instead of examining their own decisions. Consequently, we have lots of people with the illusion that social mobility is "not real."
"Absolute" mobility cannot be ignored here, as it is quite connected to the overall argument. If the middle class is being compressed and the wealth gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, then moving from the "third" decile to the "seventh" decile might mean moving from poverty to slightly above a depressed median. The majority of America being poor, and having a 15% chance to move up to 50k a year, or whatever, isn't exactly the American dream.
You of all people, Danglars, who has harped repeatedly on how out of touch us elitist left-leaning TL'ers are with how hard it is for rural/conservative/fly-over whites, should recognize that.
The problem is that absolute mobility has a bunch of confounding factors. The middle class is shrinking, but upper middle class (and above) is doing extremely well by historical standards, whereas the lower middle class and below are falling behind.
Most economist attribute this is mostly due to automation, globalization, and the shift towards a knowledge economy. On the other hand, a bifurcated society still doesn't mean that the system is dooming the individual. Suppose the 8th decile, for example, is where wage gains have rapidly increased. If relative mobility is strong enough that reaching the 8th decile or above is achievable for most people, then the fault of stagnant or declining absolute mobility is still on the individual (barring exceptions).
Furthermore, charts of absolute mobility such as the one above can be quite misleading. Sure, inflation-adjusted wages haven't moved some percentage of the population, but technological advancement makes the costs of living and goods cheaper. Your life is much better with an inflation-adjusted salary of $50,000 in 2017, than it was in 1917--even from a purely material perspective. So most people are living a better life than their parents were at the same age.
I should probably state this again: my position has never been that the state of social mobility is perfect, or that there's no unfairness in the system. The system is imperfect, can certainly be improved greatly, and we should work to improve it. However, the system works a lot better than most people on the left believe, and, given the current state of the system, there's more usually more valid blame to be placed on the individual than the system if social mobility isn't being achieved (in most cases). The claims that "social mobility isn't achievable", "meritocracy is dead", etc. don't have much basis in fact for most people.
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beginningRank <- c(1:1000)
endRank <- rank(beginningRank + rnorm(1000, 0, 400))
data <- cbind(beginningRank, endRank)
cor(beginningRank, endRank) # 0.6118082
plot(data)
EDIT: I need to work today, so I probably won't be posting for a while.
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The Useful Idiot President
The highlight of a chummy two-day visit was an extraordinary, on-the-walk handshake across the cobblestones, that included multiple mutual pats on the back of the hand and shoulder taps. At one point, the 30-second embrace drew in Macron's wife, Brigitte, leaving first lady Melania Trump standing slightly awkwardly to the side.
The unusual show of personal chemistry in Paris might just mean Macron, 39, and Trump, 71, just got along famously.
But Macron also clearly has a plan by making such an effusive show of friendship toward Trump, even though the US leader is unpopular in Europe and dismayed the French government by pulling out of the Paris climate accord.
It reflects the French leader's desire to ensure the United States does not totally divorce itself from the rest of the West.
And the charm offensive is the latest sign that some world leaders think the best way to get to Trump is not to rebuke or lecture him, but to flatter him and show him respect.
So France laid on sumptuous gastronomy, in a restaurant billed as "infused with dreams and magic" inside the Eiffel Tower. They provided a tour of Napoleon's tomb and made Trump guest of honor at the Bastille Day parade with marching bands, tanks and flyovers.
www.cnn.com
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EPT![[image loading]](https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.prod-us.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4a62db54-c3e0-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?source=next&fit=scale-down&width=592)
